Menu

Tag Archives: WordCamp

I’m at WordCamp San Francisco 2008 today and had the distinct pleasure of giving a talk on Search and Findability. Distinct pleasure because it was the first session of the day at 9am. And if any of you know me, then you know that I don’t do mornings well. :-)

My session was about Search and Findability. There seemed to be a lot of misunderstandings about what the session would be about. Findability is not SEO. SEO is an aspect of Findability. SEO makes a blog findable for search engines.

Really, Findability is all about the right data being available to the reader, whether that reader is human or a machine (search engines). To that end, theme structure is a major area of concerns. Theme developers can setup their themes to have related posts or popular posts functionality, as well as attention to search implementation. I suggested theme authors should provide search results in full format, and not simply excerpts.

Secondly, findability is all about metadata and descriptive data. Microformats provide a human semantic understanding to machine-oriented descriptive data. Examples are

1

rel="nofollow"

,

1

rel="tag"

as well as WordPress built in XFN. Human understanding of machine data.

Multimedia content should take advantage of descriptive content. This means image tagging, show notes for podcasts and caption text for videos. Of course, and understanding of tags and categories is helpful.

Thirdly, I touched briefly on Ambient Findability, a concept introduced by Peter Morville in the O’Reilly publication with the same name. Ambient Findability suggests that no matter what, where or how, content should be easily findable. At b5media the mantra was “the right content, at the right time, to the right person on the right device”. Morville asks three questions:

Lijit for WordPress – our new plugin that allows registration and configuration from inside of the WordPress admin. Also, it makes it possible to hijack the theme search form.

The slide deck from the session is available below. It is Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial licensed. In other words, use the idea, use the concepts, use the deck in it’s entirety as long as you attrbiute me. I’m Aaaron Brazell from Technosailor.com in case you didn’t know. Oh, and if you make money, I expect a cut. ;-)

Just a quick note as I’m getting ready for a meetup in my honor tonight in Boston. If you’re in the Boston area and don’t have any plans for tonight, would love to see you at Boston Beer Works across from Fenway Park. Michelle Wolverton gets all the credit for organizing and pulling the event together on my last night here in Boston (Yes, I did enjoy my first game at Fenway Park the Chapel of Awesomeness, last night!)

San Francisco

Tomorrow morning, I head out to San Francisco for WordCamp 2008. This will be my third trip to the Bay Area for this very special event and I’ll be speaking for the second time (third if you include WordCamp Dallas earlier this year). WordCamp is an exciting event for bloggers, particularly WordPress bloggers. It gives an opportunity for folks to come together and get their geek on with technical WordPress know-how or enjoy the community with other sessions geared toward more generalized topics.

For my part, I’ll be attending on behalf of Lijit along with Micah Baldwin, but will also be speaking on Findability and getting information in front of readers while driving them deeper into the site. I’ll release my slide deck in Creative Commons format after the event so look for it next week.

Mile High, Colliding with the DNC

Though I don’t anticipate participating in the DNC, I will be heading to the Rockies (Boulder to be exact) to work at Lijit World Headquarters. It will be crazy with 50k people coming in to see our next president accept his nomination and all the festivities that are involved. Someone told me there were 400 parties scheduled for the DNC which makes me think that perhaps the political catch-phrase shouldn’t be “Yes We Can” and more “1 Party, 400 parties”. DNC marketing executives have not returned comment on this idea. ;-)

What’s Happening in Vegas Needs to get On Your Calendar

Finally, next month I’ll be in Las Vegas for the annual Blog World Expo. This was one of three events I planned at the beginning of the year to be at. I attended SXSW, but will miss Gnomedex so two out of three isn’t bad.

I was talking to Rick Calvert, the organizer, and he mentioned that August 22 is the absolute drop-dead date for early registration and prices will go up significantly after that. So get registered!

On a related note, I’m looking for a hotel room to crash on the night of the 22nd. Due to Dividend Miles award travel, I ended up extending my stay a day later than most people go home. So if you’re still around Vegas for that night, give me a shout. I am open to splitting a room.

Either that or the fine folks at Southwest or JetBlue, both of whom are doing a fine job in reaching out to the social media community, can comp me a ticket. ;)

So, if our worlds might collide at one of these events, please give me a shout or look me up. My phone number is 410-608-6620.

See, I’ve been lucky enough to attend a lot of conferences and events and to interact with lots of people along the way. Most of the folks I interact with are early adopter kinds of folks that love jumping all over the newest and greatest social tools, etc. We all travel in the same circles so we always see the same people at conferences and while it’s great, it was really catching to interact with a group that doesn’t necessarily operate in those circles.

The WordCamp Dallas group was different than even WordCamp San Francisco where Om Malik has spoke two years in a row and where folks like Dave Winer, Mike Arrington, Matt Cutts and others have spoken or made some kind of appearance in the past. There were very few of the “internet rock star” types in Dallas, but the demographic that was there made it so much more rich and interesting.

ContentCamp

It was different, but it was good. I discovered a really telling and exciting thread through the entire weekend as I observed a few this:

Going into the event, I was asked to make my session technical to meet a technical audience. There were some technical people in the audience, but I felt it important to adjust my presentation to be a bit less geeky.

The most well received sessions of the weekend dealt with copyright and licensing, developing a community around your blog and the business blogging panel.

The number of people was notable who simply talked about wanting to write more, and having better insight on writing in general

To me, the common denominator, and the highlighted theme for the entire weekend, was not WordPress. Despite the fact WordPress 2.5 was released and is being well received across the board (I was watching Twitter for about 3 hours after the announcement and saw nothing but good reports). Even though the premise of the event is All Things WordPress the most value seemed to surround content.

Guess what? Content is non-platformic. Easily, this event could have been a general blogging event. Easily, value could have been gained by Movable Type users and Typepad users; by those on Blogger or Textpattern or Drupal.

Why was it that I found myself silently annoyed by WordPress fanboism in much the same way that frustration with Applegasms – the reaction by Apple fanbois whenever the beloved Cupertino company announces something new – caused me to register applegasms.com?

I reckon my annoyance comes from my feeling that WordPress is a tool. It is a wonderfully awesome tool that I support, encourage and use. However, at the end of the day, it is a tool. My friend and colleague Mark Jaquith, who is also one of the core WordPress developers, has a philosophy that I love: get WordPress to the point where the user has no idea that WordPress even exists.

At the end of the day, it’s not about if you use WordPress or Typepad or any other blog platform. Sure, there are things to consider when choosing. However, at the end of the day, it’s about creating engaging content that creates community between author and readers. That’s the important part.

Frisco, Texas

Although the event is called WordCamp Dallas, it was technically held in Frisco, Texas about 30 minutes north of Dallas. Frisco is an amazing city. In the short few days that I was there, I felt like I was watching the beginnings of a brand new city that in five years would be the hub of activity for miles around.

The city was gracious enough to lend us their City Council chamber which is an amazing, state of the art facility in itself. The acoustics of the domed room were so vibrant that I would love to play my guitar in the center of the room.

The city supported us and went out of their way to help us on a number of fronts. So, thank you, Frisco.

Best Panel EVAR

The best panel I’ve ever been on (and no offense to every other panelist I’ve shared the stage with), was the business and blogging panel. It was such an honor to share the stage with Mark Ghosh, Matt Mullenweg and Liz Strauss. I felt like I shouldn’t be up there. Thank you, folks. That panel was the highlight of my weekend.

In summary, the professionalism and agility that this unconference was delivered in was nothing short of amazing. The sponsors were all in. The organizers were quite adept. The WordPress.com folks came in to support and WordPress 2.5 was launched in the heart of Texas. I had a blast.

Post navigation

Aaron Brazell

My name is Aaron Brazell and I am the author of the WordPress Bible. I have been building WordPress solutions for over ten years for clients large and small. I have also been a core contributor. I live in Baltimore with my dog, though I (and he) claims Austin as home.